In June the Senior High Ministry at our church traveled to Colorado for Reformed Youth Movement (RYM). I could hardly wait until the bus door closed and we started our trip to and from Colorado! Really, I loved it—24 hour bus ride and all. It was a week of hiking, rafting, mountain biking, ropes courses, horseback riding, attempting to summit a 12,000+ peak, and taking on whatever else the front range of the Rockies threw at us. Each evening we worshipped together with great teaching and a time for small group discussions.

A sign in a high school football locker room read, “A confused player won’t play well.” Nothing can be more frustrating than not knowing what we are supposed to do in a given situation. And because we believe doing something is better than doing nothing we often simply do something in ministry with little reflection as to why we are doing it. If our actions bring apparent “success,” however we choose to define that, we will make that our standard mode of operation. If not, we abandon that technique and look for another, seeking through trial and error to find something that will “really work.” Our eyes have a tendency to focus on those who have achieved and we often adopt their methods, not reflecting on why those methods “worked” or evaluating them in light of our theology.

In Stephen Pressfield’s book, Gates of Fire, you have the ancient story of the Spartan’s fabled stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persians, under the leadership of Xerxes.  The story of how three hundred Spartan warriors, along with their battle slaves and their Thespaian allies, held back hundreds of thousands Persians for seven days has been recounted many times, first from antiquity by Herodotus in The Histories, and down through ages.  In our own day the movie, The Three Hundred keeps this tale alive.  The reason it has been told and retold is the same as when it originally happened in 480 B.C.  The tale of three hundred Spartans dying to a man to give their fellow countrymen a chance was such a tale of courage, honor, and valor, that it enflamed the passion of the rest of Greece, so that eventually the Greeks rallied to defeat the Persians and Western Civilization was saved.

Worship is formative. That means it has power to shape us. We are what we sing (as Mark Noll writes in a recent article in Christianity Today.) Our hearts are drawn from other “treasures” as our eyes are opened to see Jesus for who He really is. Thomas Chalmers called this the “expulsive power of a new affection.” By that phrase he means that you never really get over one love until a new one comes along. In worship we seek to have Jesus become more beautiful and believable to us. We seek to have God restore our sanity so that we can live in line with the truth of the gospel rather than in the fantasy world in which we must earn God’s favor and manipulate Him to do whatever we want.

Worship is a whole-being response to all of who God is and what He’s done for us, encompassing all of life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, offered through Jesus, in concert with all of God’s people (past, present, and around the world), using the gifts God has given us under the regulation of His Word and in response to His revelation which culminates in Christ and Him crucified, toward the goal that His kingdom would spread to the whole of creation.

There is an odd moment that occurs early on in the book of Genesis, at the creation of all things, actually. For the whole of chapter one, God conducts the symphony of creation, forming glory from nothing by the sheer force of his declared word. With each new explosion of creative wonders, God's summary of his work is simply stated: it was good. But abruptly, just after his creation reaches its apex with a creature made "in his image," God pronounces something to be "not good."

A number of years ago, the theme for the Reformed Youth Movement conference was: THE GREAT EXCHANGE. The topic was suggesting the exchange occurring with the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us, and our guilt to Him, called JUSTIFICATION. That title, though, also suggests the great mystery of transference of truth in the learning process, the exchange by which real learning occurs. What are some of the factors that must be kept in mind as we consider Paul’s mandate to Timothy: “And the things that thou hast heard of among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also”?

Sneaking out of Sunday School was pretty easy. Where to go was the hard part. I didn’t drive yet. So I couldn’t leave the church “campus”, but I also didn’t want to be seen. Not that it would matter; I didn’t think anyone would notice I was gone. They didn’t really notice when I was there.

I liked church. I liked Sunday School. I liked youth group. I just didn’t seem to fit with these students. I had grown up in the church, come to know Jesus as my Savior and Lord when I was young, and even went to a Christian school. So why did I feel like such an outsider? I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

I can often feel the inevitable question. It usually occurs at night when we've finally gotten the children to bed and are left with a few quiet minutes to ourselves, reading or watching television. She will be lightly flipping through one of the seven catalogues that arrived in the mail today when she'll turn to me and say, "What do you think about this color here for our bathroom? Would this be a good one for us?"

Do you ever feel like you are standing in front of an apathetic sports team, trying to get them psyched up for the big game? They lack focus and desire, and your motivational attempts seem to fall on deaf and uninterested ears.

The situation is far worse and more challenging than you think.